A longer gap than usual between these — Michelle and I took a brief vacation, which I'd recommend to anyone. Thank you for your patience. We came back to something genuinely worth telling you about.

Right now, your site is the only part of your teaching that never reports back.

Your class tells you who turned up. Your inbox tells you who replied. Your site takes the link you spent an evening perfecting, sends it out into the world, and returns absolutely nothing. Did that Instagram post do anything? Is anyone finding you on Google? You've had no way to know — so most teachers stop wondering, and quietly assume the answer is no.

That ends today — and we suspect you will find it hard to go back.

Meet "How your site is doing"

There's a new chart icon in your editor's top bar. Click it.

You'll get the short version right there in a side panel, and a full report one click further. And it answers the question you've actually been asking all along: where are these people coming from?

• Search engines — someone googled, and found you
• Instagram
• Facebook
• Email
• Messages — WhatsApp, iMessage, a text to a student
• Direct or saved — typed in, bookmarked, tapped from your link-in-bio
• Any other site that linked to you, named

Real numbers, in your own language. No "sessions". No "bounce rate". No dashboard that needs a tutorial before it means anything. You'll know within about four seconds whether your last post was worth the effort — and that is a genuinely different feeling from posting into silence.

And there is nothing to set up. No Google Analytics account. No tracking code to paste into a box you don't understand. No cookie banner suddenly squatting on the beautiful page you built.

That last one matters more than it sounds. Every other way of doing this would have put a consent pop-up in front of your visitors — on a site whose entire appeal is that it feels calm. So we built ours differently: no cookies, no fingerprinting, nothing at all stored about the person visiting. All we keep is a daily tally per source, the sort of thing you'd scratch on a notepad by the door. Your visitors' privacy stays intact, your page stays clean, and you still get the answer.

Your own visits don't count toward it. Neither do the bots.

Share links that count themselves

Now the part that will quietly double what your report is worth.

Here's a thing nobody tells you about analytics: when someone taps your link inside an Instagram story, or opens it from a text message, the browser hands over nothing whatsoever about where they came from. It's a dead end. Those visits pile into "Direct or saved" and the credit evaporates — which is exactly why so many teachers conclude social media "doesn't work" for them. So we fixed it at the source. Your report gives you three buttons:

Copy link for Instagram · Copy link for email · Copy link for messages

Share using the matching one and those visits land in the right column. You never see a tracking parameter, you never have to understand one, and neither does anyone else — the tag is tidied out of the address bar the instant a visitor arrives, so they just see your normal, clean site address.

If you change one habit this month, make it this one. It's the whole difference between "47 people came directly" and "your Tuesday story brought me 31 people" — and only one of those tells you what to do next Tuesday.

Just published? Here's what you'll see

If your site is new, you won't get a breakdown straight away. You'll get a progress bar counting toward 25 visits — and a much better message than zeros.

We chose that on purpose, because the alternative is worse. At eight visits, a breakdown invents patterns that aren't there: two people from search becomes "25% of my traffic is search", which sounds authoritative and means nothing. We'd rather say "it's early" than hand you a confident chart built on almost nothing.

So until you cross 25, you get your real count, your progress toward it, and the reason — plus the single most useful thing you can do about it, which is send your link to a few students. Sites get their first visitors when their teacher shares them. That's not a consolation prize; it's the actual mechanism.

And if your site is quiet because it isn't published, or because it went offline, the page tells you that instead of cheerfully reporting that nobody's been by.

Uploads: three things that were quietly broken

Your bio photo on setup now actually uploads. If you signed up recently and that step just… didn't work, it wasn't you. It had been broken since we rebuilt the image picker. It's fixed.

Uploads no longer die if you leave the editor open. Leave a tab open an hour, come back, add an image, and it would fail — with nothing useful on screen — until you reloaded. Your uploads now stay valid for as long as your tab is.

And when an upload does fail, it tells you why. Every failure used to look identical. Now you get the actual reason and the actual fix:

• "That image is too large. Please choose one under 10 MB."
• "Your session has expired. Refresh the page, then add your image again."
• "The upload could not reach the server. Check your connection and try again."

Not glamorous. But "something went wrong" at the exact moment you're trying to finish your page is its own small betrayal, and it deserved fixing properly.

Also, under the hood

• Cleared out unused code left over from the old upload system.
• Tightened how default themes are stored, so a new site can't end up without one.
• Fixed a configuration issue that was blocking deploys.

Nothing you'll see — but exactly the sort of thing that stops being invisible at the worst possible moment.

Your two minutes this week

1. Open the chart icon in your editor. See where your people are coming from.
2. Next time you post your link, grab it from Copy link for Instagram instead of the address bar. Future you will know exactly what that post was worth.

If your report looks wrong for your site, message us through the support chat in the editor and we'll look at your specific setup.

You no longer need to go hunting for a photo, download it, remember where it saved, and upload it. Open the image picker on any section, switch to the Photos tab, and search a library of hundreds of thousands of free, high-quality images — yoga, nature, studios, food, anything. Pick one and it drops straight into your page.

Because the photo now arrives the same way one from your own computer does, you can also crop and adjust it before it lands — something that wasn't possible before. The images are free to use and the photographers are credited automatically; you don't have to think about any of it.

It's the fastest way we've got to make a page look finished. If your hero banner is still on a default background, this is two minutes very well spent.

A publish switch on every section

Until now, only your Classes had a clear "show this on my site" toggle. Your Services, Events, and Testimonials each have one now too, sitting right in the edit window where you'd expect it. Flip it on to make something public, off to tuck it away as a draft while you work on it — nothing half-finished goes live before you're ready.

While you're in there, it's worth a quick once-over of each section to confirm the things you meant to publish are switched on. If a section looks empty on your live site but full in the editor, this is almost always why — and now it's a one-tap fix.

One thing to know: unpublishing an event also takes its dedicated detail page offline, and turning the event back on won't automatically bring the detail page back — you re-publish that separately. The editor now reminds you of this right at the switch, so it won't catch you out.

Editing your hero just got smoother

Your hero — the big banner at the top of your page — is the first thing a visitor sees, so editing it should feel calm. It didn't: clicking into edit mode used to nudge everything sideways and resize your buttons, so what you were typing on never quite matched what you'd ship.

That's fixed. What you see while editing is now exactly what publishes — the text stays put, the buttons keep their real size, and the panel grows to fit instead of clipping. There's also a small "editing hero" cue so it's always clear which mode you're in.

And if you edit on your phone: the "Change background image" button was there all along but rendered invisibly (white text on a white panel). It's visible now, so swapping your hero photo from mobile actually works.

A small "Powered by myMat" badge in your footer

We've added a discreet "Powered by myMat" link to the footer of every published site — including yours. It's small, it sits quietly at the very bottom, and it links back to us so people who love your page can find out how it was made.

We wanted to tell you plainly rather than have you spot it on your own site and wonder where it came from. It appears only on your public, published pages — never in the editor, and never on a private preview only you can see.

Your event pages now share and search properly

Last week we fixed how your main site introduces itself in search results and shared links. Your individual event pages — for workshops, retreats and trainings — were still behind on that, and now they've caught up.

When you share a link to a specific retreat, it writes its own preview: the event's title, its description, and its photo, instead of a blank or half-finished card. Search engines get the same clean information, pointed at the event's own page rather than your homepage. Nothing new to fill in — it's built from what you've already written.

Also fixed

• Event pages that were erroring for some teachers now work. If you'd filled in your teacher profile, your event detail pages could fail to load entirely. Fixed, with a test to keep it fixed.
• Your bio photo now appears on event pages. It never had.
• Your bio's formatting — paragraphs and links — is kept intact on event pages instead of being flattened.

Your two minutes this week

1. Give your hero a real photo from the new Photos tab if it's still on a default.
2. Skim each section and confirm what you meant to publish is switched on.

Both live in the editor. If anything looks off on your live site, message us through the support chat in the editor and we'll take a look at your specific setup.

— Jim & Michelle (The myMat team)

Between April and the end of July, myMat sites were not being read properly by search engines.

Your site looked completely normal in a browser — that's exactly why it took us so long to catch. But when Google's crawler came to visit, it was handed a blank page. No title, no text, nothing to index. For any studio relying on search to be found, that's the difference between existing and not.

That's fixed as of 30 July. Sites now serve fully-formed pages to crawlers, and we've added monitoring so that if the part responsible ever stops working again, the site restarts itself rather than quietly serving empty pages.

We're sorry. If you've been wondering why search traffic went quiet this spring, this was why — and it wasn't anything you did.

Search engines take days to weeks to re-crawl and re-rank a site, so give it a little time. Everything below is designed to make that re-crawl count for as much as possible.

Your site now introduces itself properly

When someone shares your site — in a text, on Instagram, in a Facebook post — the preview card that appears was, frankly, embarrassing. Blank descriptions. Titles that ended in a stray "|". No preview image, even when your hero photo was sitting right there.

Now your site writes its own introduction from what you've already told us:

• The title uses your name, falling back to your own name if you haven't set one.
• The description uses your site description, or your bio, or your tagline — whichever you've filled in. It's never blank.
• The preview image uses your hero photo, so shared links actually look like your studio.

There's nothing new to fill in. We only ever use words you wrote — we won't invent a yoga style or a location for you, because that would mean putting a claim about your business in front of the public that you never made.

If you do want more control, editing your site title, tagline or description in the editor changes what search engines and social previews show. Those fields now pull double duty.

Workshops and retreats can appear as real event listings

You know how some events show up in Google with a date, a price and a "Register" line right there in the results? That requires giving Google a structured description of the event, and we now do that automatically for your published workshops, retreats, trainings and classes.

One thing worth knowing: we're strict about dates on purpose. If your event date is written in a way that could be read two ways — 09/10/2025 means September 10th in the US and October 9th nearly everywhere else — we leave the event out of the structured listing rather than guess. Publishing your retreat on a day it doesn't happen is worse than not publishing it at all.

So it's worth a quick check. If you write your event dates unambiguously — 15 Jan 2026 rather than 09/10/2025, and always with a year — your events become eligible for those richer search results. Same for prices: $3500 works, from £15 and donation based don't give us an amount and a currency to work with, so we leave the price off rather than get it wrong.

Weekly classes get their recurring schedule described properly — the days and times you set, marked as weekly — instead of a made-up one-off date.

Half-finished sites now stay out of search until they're ready

Your site goes live the moment you pick a name and a web address, which is step one of setting up. Everything after that — your theme, your classes, your bio — is optional and might happen days later.

Until now, that meant a brand-new, empty site could be picked up by Google and indexed as an empty site. First impressions are hard to undo.

Now, a site is only offered to search engines once there's something real on it: a bio, or at least one published class, event or offering. Before that, it stays reachable to anyone you send the link to, but it stays out of search results.

A few deliberate decisions in there worth naming:

• Contact details aren't required. Plenty of teachers work online only, or would rather not publish a phone number. Requiring contact info would have hidden exactly the studios who made a sensible privacy decision.
• We don't require you to "finish" setup. There's no checklist you have to complete. Add real content and you're in.

We also now publish a proper sitemap for every studio site, so search engines know which of your pages exist rather than having to stumble across them.

A late payment no longer costs you your search ranking

This one is quiet but matters a lot.

When a subscription lapsed, we took the site offline in a way that told search engines the site was permanently gone. Google would remove it. When the subscription was reactivated and the site came back, it came back to nothing — starting from zero, with weeks of re-indexing ahead. A studio a week late paying could lose months of hard-won search position.

Now an offline site tells search engines "temporarily unavailable, check back" instead. Your ranking is held while you're away and is there when you return.

To be clear about privacy: this response is identical for every offline site, whether you unpublished it yourself for a rebrand or a payment didn't go through. A visitor can't tell the difference, and neither can anyone poking at your site from the outside. Your billing situation is nobody else's business.

Event pages that were broken now work

If you'd filled in your teacher profile, your event detail pages were erroring out — for visitors and for you. That's fixed.

Two related things came with it:

• Your bio photo now actually appears on event pages. It never had, due to a mix-up on our side that failed silently instead of loudly.
• Your bio formatting is preserved. Paragraphs and links now render properly on event pages instead of showing raw formatting.

Accessibility and readability

Public pages are being read by more than just people browsing — screen readers and search crawlers both rely on the underlying structure of a page. Two fixes here:

• Page headings now follow a proper order. Class and event card titles were sitting at the wrong level, which makes a page harder to navigate with a screen reader and muddier for search engines to interpret. Fixing it without changing how anything looks took more care than you'd expect.
• Your teacher photo is now described by name. Every myMat site was using the same generic description for that image. Identical descriptions across thousands of sites describe nothing — and this is the one image most worth describing properly.

Behind the scenes

Less glamorous, but it's what stops the above from silently breaking again:

• Automated checks now catch a whole class of bug before it can reach your site. The tool meant to be doing this had been running and finding nothing at all — turning it on properly surfaced two real defects that were already live, including one affecting our in-app support chat.
• Background jobs — trial reminders, billing reconciliation — are running for the first time in months.
• Routine security and dependency updates.

What you should do

Nothing, mostly. All of this applies to your existing site automatically.

Two optional things worth ten minutes:

1. Check your event dates and prices are written unambiguously (15 Jan 2026, $45) so your events qualify for richer search listings.
2. Check your site description and bio are filled in — they're now doing real work in search results and shared links.

Search engines re-crawl on their own schedule, so give it a couple of weeks before judging the results. If your site still isn't appearing after that, reach out through the support chat in the editor and we'll take a look at your specific setup.

Students are not reading any of that. They want to know four things, and they want to know them in about eight seconds.

1. What you teach, in plain words

Not "a somatic-informed vinyasa practice rooted in embodied inquiry." Write the version you would say to someone at a bus stop: "Slow, strong vinyasa. Lots of breath. No chanting."

Style names are useful as a filter, but only after the plain-language version.

2. When and where your classes are

This is the single most-visited thing on a teacher's site, and it is the thing most often out of date. A schedule that is three weeks stale is worse than no schedule at all — it teaches people not to trust the page.

If you can only keep one thing current, keep this one.

3. How to book

One button. One. If a student has to email you to ask how to book, you have already lost most of them.

4. What it costs

Teachers hide pricing more than almost any other profession, usually out of a worry that it will put people off. In practice the opposite happens: unclear pricing makes people assume the worst and leave.

Drop-in rate, class pass, and anything you offer for people who cannot afford the standard rate. Three lines is enough.

5. Proof that you are real

One photograph of you actually teaching, and two or three sentences from students. Not fifteen testimonials — two good ones beat fifteen generic ones.

What you can leave out for now

• A blog, until you have something you actually want to write
• A shop, until you have something to sell
• A newsletter signup, until you know what you would send
• Your full training history — one line is plenty

You can add all of these later. Almost nobody regrets launching with five sections; plenty of people never launch at all because they were building fifteen.

Start with what a student needs to make one decision: whether to come to your next class.